The first time I left home I was 16 years old and had just enough money to make it to Reno on a Peter Pan. I found a job almost immediately washing dishes at a diner off Ralston street. There I fell in love with a waitress six years my senior named Greta, a chain smoking Norwegian who gave didnt give a shit about anything. We were introduced in the midst of the three AM rush and I swore to myself that one day Id make her mine. I was invincible then and took every shift I was offered, hoping shed realize we were meant to be, that if I was around enough Id rub off on her. I wrote enough shitty poems about her to clog every toilet in town. Our boss was a pile of a man named Dominick, all sweaty palms and bottom line. He rented me a room upstairs for forty dollars a week. There was a mattress under the window and a trashcan in the corner. I shared a bathroom in the hallway with an unspecified number of mammals, none of which I ever saw despite -or perhaps because of- the poets hours I kept in those days. A few weeks into that Reno residency in my room above the diner, something strange happened: I woke up one morning to find the trash can full of water. And not just plain water; it had an odd, somewhat floral scent to it, but with an earthy and familiar pungency I couldnt place. I checked the ceiling for signs of leaks and found none. I dumped the buckets contents in the communal bathrooms tub and went on with my day. The next morning i awoke to the same thing. And the morning after that as well. I tried moving the trash can from the corner of my room to the foot of the bed, convinced for some reason that proximity was the key. I was mistaken. One morning I woke up late for a double downstairs and left without emptying the bucket. When I returned that night, I downed a half pint of Rumplemintz and went to sleep. There are no words to describe the nightmares I had that night. In a cold sweat at half past four, I stumbled down the hall and emptied the cursed can, shaking like Frank the Regular and trying not to cry. One minute later I was back in bed, sleeping like a baby. And the next morning, when I awoke, the trashcan was full once more. So it became part of my morning routine: Id wake up, light a smoke, wonder what Greta was doing, then get up to take a piss and pour that weird water out of my trashcan. Weeks passed. Greta got hired at a steakhouse up the street. Reno lost its shine so I bought a bus ticket back to Jersey. In a truckstop lot off an anonymous interstate in the dark and deep midwest I bummed a smoke off a lanky French Canadian named Guy. I felt compelled, for some reason, to share with him the tale of my mysterious trashcan. When I finished he nodded and gave a little laugh. Merde du fantôme, he said, and told me the story of his uncle Olivier: The ghost crossed the line when it took a shit in my uncles sink. He had been able to ignore most of the spirits previous manifestations --doors openng and closing without explanation; a weeks worth of bottlecaps turning up in one of his slippers; things going bump in the night-- but this was different. The ante had been upped: the shit meant business. Uncles first thought was holy water, but after some reflection he realized this was not a realistic option. The church was too far --at least a mile and a half past the liquor store-- and he wasnt sure what, exactly, he was supposed to do with the water once hed gotten it anyway. He decided instead to place an open bottle of birchbeer atop a bible on the floor in front of the sink. He spent the rest of the day sitting as still as he could, listening to himself breathe. When the sun went down, he went to bed. That night, uncle Olivier dreamed he sat in his bathroom on a long pew with his wife and his son -deceased and estranged, respectively- on either side of him. He tried to tell them hed missed them, that it was good to see them, that hed never, for even one second, forgotten them, but they did not hear. So they played a game that was a lot like checkers, the main difference being that pieces would appear and reappear without warning. The game went on in silence for hours. Uncle woke up with his eyes still closed, a thing he didnt think hed ever done before, and the dream drifted away. He made his way towards the bathroom, slowly and with a vague sense of superstition. When he flipped the light switch, he saw that the bottle of birchbeer was empty and the shit was gone. To this day that empty bottle sits on his nightstand, and god help you if you try to touch it. In four weeks time, the deadmen will take the stage at the 9:30 club. We hope you will join us.
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 02:55:36 +0000
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